“I have tried to persuade Chen to come and live with us,” James said.
“Oh, yes,” Louise cried eagerly. “That would be fun.”
“There is plenty of room,” Mary said, “and we’ll all live more cheaply, several together.”
“I’d like it,” Peter said politely. He was not quite sure, now that he had stopped laughing, what Liu Chen was. A doctor? But he spoke no English apparently. All evening, while they had slipped in and out of English, he had steadily spoken only Chinese.
“Now you see how welcome you are,” James said. “Come, Chen, promise us.”
Chen looked about on them, his eyes glistening in the moonlight and a half smile upon his lips. His eyes fell last on Louise. “Well, well, I will think about it,” he said. “Perhaps it is too soon,” he said, laughing again. “I have bad table manners and when I sleep I snore loudly.”
“Never mind!” Mary said.
The end of it was that in less than a week Chen moved into the house, taking the far end room beyond Peter’s. To Little Dog Young Wang said, “Now there is somebody in the house who knows what must be done. He is no foreigner like the others.” And he slapped Little Dog lightly on both ears, to show him that he, like Liu Chen, would stand no nonsense under this roof.
Mrs. Liang’s letter reached her children only after a month. She had not understood that extra stamps were needed for airmail and so it had been carried across the ocean by an ordinary steamship, had waited the pleasure of a clerk in the Shanghai post office who had just got himself married and was in no haste about his work, and had reached the hospital in mid-autumn.
The autumn was unusually mild. There had been no high winds and therefore little dust, and the camel caravans had not yet come in for the winter to stir up the streets with their huge flopping feet. Since it was the first really peaceful year since the Japanese had withdrawn, the chrysanthemums were large and fine. Gardeners in private houses and in commercial gardens had vied with each other to produce the sort of flowers that they had before the war. Mary had gone drunk with pleasure in them. Chrysanthemum vendors had learned that if they came to the gate early in the morning before she went to the hospital or late after she came back, they were sure of a sale. She had bought dozens of pots. The court was lined with them, and they stood against the walls of the house inside the rooms. In her own room the window was a bower with her favorites, whose curled scarlet petals were lined with gold.
She was very happy. She loved the house, and she missed nothing of what she had had in New York. The closeness of this house to the earth, its snugness under the heavy roof, the privacy of the court, the shade under the great leaning pine, all was as she liked it. Especially she liked the simplicity of life in such a house. There was no machinery to vex by breaking down when it was most needed. Little Dog’s mother and Little Dog himself were excellent servants, provided one made certain of a few rules of cleanliness. Little Dog must not wash his clothes in the dishpan, and Little Dog’s mother must not wash the rice bowls by running her fingers around them in a pail of cold water. They obeyed her with smiling tolerance, or she thought they did. She explained to them earnestly about germs, and argued with Chen when he simply said everything must be eaten hot.
“I am sure that Little Dog understands, and I have told Young Wang to watch the other two.”
“Young Wang is a good fellow,” Chen said, “but I trust my own intelligence rather than his. I prefer to eat my food hot, especially as there is still some cholera in the city.”
Chen and Mary argued over many things. Both were stubborn and neither yielded to the other. Louise always took Chen’s side, whatever the argument. It seemed sometimes that she did not love her elder sister, and Mary more than once went away with tears in her eyes, which she was too proud to show. After she had so left them one day, Louise said to Chen, “Mary has never let me feel free. It was really her fault, I believe, that Pa made us come here.”
Chen by now knew that she had been in love with an American and that her parents had sent her away. James had told him this, and Chen had listened, his heart beating rather fast and his blood feeling hot in his veins. He was angry that an American should look at a Chinese girl, but he felt sorry for Louise. She was very young, and too pretty for her own good. He discussed with James at some length the problem of beauty in a woman, and whether it was her fault that her strength was not equal to her temptations. “This strength,” Chen said, “might actually be greater than that of an ugly woman, but the ugly woman is praised for a self-control which may in fact be very slight indeed.”
“I hope you are not sorry that you have come to Peking?” Chen now said to Louise. He was surprised and somewhat alarmed at the tenderness he felt was in his voice, and hearing it he became bashful.
“I don’t like it here as well as I do in New York,” Louise said.
“But you have a very gay time, don’t you?” Chen urged. He knew how eagerly James hoped that this younger sister would want to stay here, and how much he hoped, indeed, that she would find a husband.
Louise pouted and shrugged her shoulders. “There is nothing very gay in Peking,” she said.
“There are the palaces,” Chen reminded her. They had spent several Sunday afternoons, all of them together, visiting the Forbidden City, and they had been invited on some picnics by Dr. Su and Dr. Kang to go outside the city walls and see the Summer Palace and the fine old monasteries in the hills.
“What I mean is that there is nothing here like Radio City,” Louise said with contempt in her large black eyes.
Chen was speaking in Chinese but she spoke English always.
“I was never in New York,” Chen said somewhat humbly.
“Then you never saw the best of America,” Louise retorted.
“Perhaps,” Chen said thoughtfully. He continued to look at Louise.
“Why are you staring at me?” she demanded.
“Because you are very pretty,” Chen said. This truth came out of him so suddenly that he was astonished and then ashamed and he turned red.
Louise laughed. “Have you only just found it out?” she asked.
“Yes,” Chen said abruptly. He felt much distressed that he had spoken so coarsely and without saying anything more he went away.
Ever since that day, now some two weeks ago, he had been troubled by his conscience. Should he not tell James that he was beginning to think often of Louise? But having said this, what else could he say? He did not want to take a wife. He had some vague ideas that he had not yet worked into reality even in his thinking. He was not at all sure that he wished to continue much longer here at the hospital. What it was he wanted to do he did not know and if he took a wife, he would be compelled to stay here, particularly if it were a young modern woman such as Louise. Yet he recognized the danger of staying near her, and of allowing his eyes to see her every day. Yet what was he to do? James would certainly demand the truth from him, and he would be ashamed to tell him that this younger sister stirred up his blood at the same time that he knew he did not want to marry her. This was coarse and he did not wish to reveal such coarseness in himself. He had always prided himself on being a better man than Su, for example, or Kang, or any of the exquisites in the hospital, and now he was feeling just as they did over a pretty girl.
When he left her thus abruptly, Louise had looked after him thoughtfully. She had waited daily for a letter from Philip, or even from Estelle. To Estelle she had poured out her hatred of everything in this medieval city and all her longing for New York. To Philip she had written six heartbroken pages. Neither had answered. When the days began to slip into weeks something hard appeared in her heart. She had refused to go to school and on the pretext of keeping house she had stayed at home, idling her days away. There was nothing to do. Little Dog and his mother under the supervision of Young Wang kept everything smoothly running. The house was comfortable in its fashion, while the weather was still warm. She slept a great deal, and she borrowed books from the English library at the hospital and read novels. There was a motion-picture theater and she went there sometimes, although always with Little Dog’s mother as chaperone. Chen had spoken to James about that.